The scene was set for celebration. What unfolded was a reckoning.
At the University of the Philippines' famed lecture theater, students from across Asia’s elite universities gathered to see the future of trading laid bare by machines.
They expected Plazo to hand them a blueprint to machine-driven wealth.
They were wrong.
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### When a Maverick Started with a Paradox
He’s built AI systems with mythic win rates.
The moment he began speaking, the room quieted.
“AI can beat the market. But only if you teach it when not to try.”
The note-taking paused.
It challenged everything the crowd believed.
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### Dismantling the Myth of Machine Supremacy
There were no demos, no dashboards, no datasets.
He projected mistakes— neural nets falling apart under real-world pressure.
“Most AI is trained on yesterday. Investing happens tomorrow.”
Then, with a pause that felt like a punch, he asked:
“Can your AI feel the fear of 2008? Not the charts. The *emotion*.”
The silence became the answer.
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### Tension in the Halls of Thought
Of course, the audience pushed back.
A PhD student from Kyoto noted how large language models now detect emotion in text.
Plazo nodded. “Detection is not understanding.”
A data scientist from HKUST proposed that probabilistic models could one day simulate conviction.
Plazo’s reply was metaphorical:
“You can simulate weather. But conviction? That’s lightning. You can’t forecast where it’ll strike. Only feel when it does.”
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### When Faith Replaces Thinking
His fear isn’t code—it’s the cult.
“This isn’t innovation. It’s surrender.”
Still, he clarified: AI belongs in the cockpit—not in the captain’s seat.
His company’s Joseph Plazo systems scan sentiment, order flow, and liquidity.
“But every output is double-checked by human eyes.”
He paused, then delivered the future’s scariest phrase:
“‘The model told me to do it.’ That’s what we’ll hear after every disaster in the next decade.”
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### Asia’s Enthusiasm, Interrupted
Across Asian tech hubs, AI is gospel.
Dr. Anton Leung, a Singapore-based ethicist, whispered after the talk:
“This was theology, not technology.”
Later, in a faculty roundtable, Plazo pressed the point:
“Don’t just teach students to *code* AI. Teach them to *think* with it.”
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### Sermon on the Market
The final minutes felt more like poetry than programming.
“The market isn’t math,” he said. “ It’s human, messy, unpredictable. And if your AI can’t read character, it’ll miss the plot.”
The room froze.
Others compared it to hearing Taleb for the first time.
He came to remind us: we are still responsible.